The Walt Disney Company, an icon of mainstream America, will move against the grain of conventional business strategy this spring when it stops distributing a catalog that has filled the mailboxes of tens of millions of households for the last decade, and instead embarks on a Web-only initiative.

"Customers almost dictated this to us," said Paul Gainer, vice president of Disney Shopping, a division of Disney Consumer Products. "Once they go online we just don't see them going back to the phone."